Georgian London: Into the Streets (19 page)

The Foundling Hospital complex, detail from John Rocque’s map, 1745

This application of pressure paid off: on 14 August 1739, George II signed the charter establishing the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children. In 1740, thirty-four acres of pasture near Southampton Row were purchased from the Earl of Salisbury, and ‘The Foundling’, as it became known, moved there from its cramped Hatton Garden premises.

Meanwhile, the governors had drawn up rules for admission. The children were to be less than two months old, free from venereal disease and otherwise healthy. The adult who gave up the child would have to wait while they were examined and take them away if they proved unsuitable. Once admission had been agreed upon, any possessions, birthmarks and scars were logged, with any items placed in a numbered leather bag. The corresponding lead ‘tag’ would be placed on a chain around the child’s neck, and its removal forbidden, thus enabling the child to be reclaimed should the parents wish to take them back at a later stage. The children were then given to wet nurses on the borders of London. When they returned, they would be taught how to read and how to knit, spin and sew. The boys would be destined for manual labour or the sea, and the girls for domestic service.

The first children were admitted on 25 March 1741. There to supervise their admission were the Duke of Richmond and William Hogarth. A crowd had gathered outside, and the porter struggled to close the door on those wanting to get in. Thirty children were admitted, made up of eighteen boys and twelve girls, and ‘
the Expressions of Grief
of the Women whose Children could not be admitted were Scarcely more observable than those of some of the Women
who parted with their Children, so that a more moving Scene can’t well be imagined’.

Like Bedlam, The Foundling was not mean accommodation: the children had space and light, and the buildings were handsome. Cows were kept on the estate to supply milk, and the children had their own spring, Powis Wells. Soon, they were to have their own art gallery, with pictures by ‘
four eminent painters
- by Hayman, Hogarth, Hymore & Wills’, and charity concerts, including benefit performances by Handel. Handel also donated a new organ, on which he would give many benefit performances of the
Messiah
in years to come. At the rehearsal for the annual performance of the
Messiah
in 1759, he suffered a fit and died a week later.

When the hospital was built, Great Ormond Street marked the northern limit of London, and the hospital sat out in the fields in the fresh air. The governors planned a spartan regime for their charges: they rose at five in the spring and summer, six in September, seven in autumn and winter. They had an hour to wash and put on their brown uniforms, made of a coarse wool called ‘drugget’. These were designed by Hogarth, and the wool was brightened up with a jaunty scarlet trim. His sisters were dressmakers, so perhaps he had called on them for inspiration. Each child had jobs which they went about until eight, when they sat down at long tables for a breakfast consisting of broth, gruel or porridge. After breakfast, the younger children worked at their reading and the older children worked at their jobs. At noon, they had a half-hour break for a lunch made of boiled mutton, beef or pork as well as rice and dumplings. Supper was bread on its own three times a week, bread and milk twice a week, and bread and cheese twice a week.

The reaction to The Foundling was not altogether favourable. Newspapers speculated that courting couples would be tempted to ‘sin’ by the charity. The association of the area with illicit sex and bastardy was compounded by the opening of The London Lying-In Hospital, in Aldersgate Street, from 1751.
One scathing broadside
addressed ‘Batchelors and Maids’, and explained how a girl might go to the country ‘to take the Air’ at Aldersgate, give birth and return to London ‘a Maid again’ after the child had been given over as a foundling. In February
1760, Parliament effectively withdrew its financial support after granting The Foundling a large amount of money to be self-supporting. They set a deadline of 25 March for the final admission via their traditional reception method.
The last child
to be taken in before the deadline was a girl, and the governors named her Kitty Finis.

Withdrawal of government funding was a setback, but The Foundling became a giant with more than 6,000 children under its care. To bring in more much-needed funds, it began to hire out the older children as cheap day labour. This was one of The Foundling’s least popular actions amongst supporters and the press. Often those who were willing to take on the parish apprentices were ‘
so inhuman
, as to regard only the pecuniary Consideration; and having once received that, they, by ill Usage and undue Severity, often drive the poor Creatures from them’. Many children ran away, often turning up on the doorstep of their old wet nurse. One boy made it as far as Luton to get back to his foster family. The hospital’s policies were strict, and wet nurses had to take the foundling in as one of their family, rather than on a puppy-farming model. Some wet nurses and their husbands, having seen first steps and heard first words, persuaded The Foundling to allow them to adopt. Others kept in touch with their former charges and visited them whenever possible, which often involved at least a day’s travel each way from the countryside, by foot and wagon.

Back in London, most of the boys were apprenticed at sea, as gardeners, or to the master sweeps. Master sweeps patrolled the streets of London with their climbing boys, and sometimes climbing girls, waiting to be accosted by housekeepers and footmen. Only small children were agile enough to scramble up and brush the soot down inside the cramped, kinking chimneys. Suffocation, burns and falls were a constant threat.

In 1817, the story of the death
of eight-year-old Thomas Pitts was recounted before a Parliamentary Committee. Thomas’s boss was ‘a chimney sweeper of the name of Griggs [who] attended to sweep a small chimney in the brewhouse of Messrs Calvert and Co.’ The fire was still lit, so Griggs extinguished it and sent the boy down from the top. Inside the chimney was an iron pipe, perhaps carrying hot water. Thomas became lodged against it, and shouted, ‘I cannot come up,
master, I must die here.’ The alarm was raised. A bricklayer working nearby came and smashed into the chimney with a sledgehammer, he and Griggs clawing at the bricks. They pulled Thomas from the chimney, but he was dead. The report of the surgeon attending was that most of Thomas’s lower body was badly burned – as were his elbows, down to the bone – where ‘the unhappy sufferer made some attempts to return as soon as the horrors of his situation became apparent’.

Griggs had not been an inhuman boss. He may have put Thomas in the situation which killed him, but he had done his best to get him out, even forcing himself up the hot, broken chimney to recover the boy. Thomas’s death was just the luck of the draw for chimney sweeps, though luck of any kind had little to do with the lot of the sweep: should these boys survive to adolescence, they were prone to a testicular cancer known as ‘sooty-warts’ – ‘
a most noisome
, painful, and fatal disease’ brought on by carcinogens in soot. For decades, it was believed to be a venereal disease resulting from sooty lovemaking, because it arrived with the onset of puberty.

There were a few incidences of climbing girls, but mostly they were put out to do women’s work. This included helping midwives such as Elizabeth Brownrigg, a respected midwife in Fetter Lane. She took girls from The Foundling to help her during births, but all was not what it seemed.

In 1767, a girl named Mary Clifford
turned fifteen. Upon the death of her mother, her father had married another woman, also named Mary. Four years later, he left her. Unable to support a young girl, Mary had left her stepdaughter with The Foundling Hospital and ‘gone into Cambridgeshire’. Young Mary Clifford was put into service with Elizabeth Brownrigg. Clifford had the misfortune to be a bed-wetter, which gave Elizabeth Brownrigg and her teenage son, John, an excuse to shave her head, strip her, make her work naked and beat her while she hung from a hook in this state. They locked her up for whole weekends, without food or water, while they went to their cottage in Hertfordshire.

After only a few months, Mrs Clifford returned to London in better circumstances and sought out her stepdaughter in Fetter Lane. She was turned from the door, John Brownrigg telling her that Mary
did not want to see her. The real reason was that he and his mother had beaten Mary into insensibility.

William Clipson was an apprentice baker to Mr Deacon next door. He was upstairs in his master’s house and happened to look into the Brownriggs’ yard. There he saw Mary Clifford, lying in the filth with their pig. He crawled out of a skylight and ‘spoke to her two or three times, but could get no answer … I saw her eyes black, and her face very much swelled … I went down and told my mistress what I had seen, and what a shocking condition the girl was in.’ Parish overseers and a constable were called to the house. Mrs Clifford and the neighbours forced their way inside. When they found Mary

 … her face was swelled as big as two, her mouth was so swelled she could not shut it, and she was cut all under her throat, as if it had been with a cane, she could not speak; all her shoulders had sores all in one … cut by whips or sticks … her head was cut, she had a great many wounds upon it, and cuts all about her back and her legs.

Mary died later that day. Brownrigg was despised by the press as an unnatural mother and a monster. She was found guilty and hanged at Tyburn on the Monday following her trial. James and John Brownrigg spent six months in Newgate and were bound over for seven years. Such was the public hatred for John Brownrigg that when he was released, he shortened his name to Brown and moved further west, near Oxford Circus.

Despite such shocking cases, the governors of The Foundling did their best for the thousands of children in their care. They did not turn away children of mixed race. They took in children of insane mothers, and they became increasingly aware that The Foundling served a dual purpose: by relieving parents of a child they could no longer care for, the governors noted that there was a chance they could be restored ‘to a course of Industry and Virtue so that almost every Act of the Charity is attended with a Double Benefit, the preservation of the Child and of the Parent’. One disabled boy, George Grafton, had been admitted aged ten with such severe club feet that he had learned to walk on the outside of his ankles. He underwent a successful surgical repair for the condition, paid for by The Foundling.
The hospital also paid for him to be apprenticed to a shoemaker. He returned to the hospital’s employ to ‘furnish shoes for the children’. Blind children were educated for a career in music. One of these, Tom Grenville, became the organist at The Foundling as a grown man, living locally with his wife and family. Some children were too profoundly disabled ever to leave, and were cared for all their lives.

What became of the children who left? Many returned at some point. Some came for help, some for advice, some for information about their parents. One such child was Sarah Billington who, aged twenty-eight, wrote, ‘
desiring to be informed
who are her parents; she having laboured for many years under the greatest anxiety of mind, wishing to know them’. The governors could do no more than send her a copy of her admission notes.

The Foundling continued on the same spot until the 1920s, when the land was sold for development. All that remains of the hospital today are the colonnades, although in recent years The Foundling Hospital Charity has provided a playground for Great Ormond Street Hospital. Thus Thomas Coram’s legacy still attends to the needs of children at a difficult time in their lives. The pride those involved felt in the institution was reflected in the instructions drawn up by the governors, in 1754, for those about to leave: ‘Be not ashamed that you were bred in this Hospital. Own it.’

‘
The parish of St. Giles, with its nests of close and narrow alleys and courts inhabited by the lowest class of Irish costermongers, has passed into a byword as the synonym of filth and squalor.’ The Irish presence in London ran through all social classes and occupations, but nowhere was it more visible than in St Giles.

Since at least the reign of Elizabeth I, Irish workers had travelled to London in May after they had planted their potato crops. They then worked through the summer, mainly on the hay harvest in the fields surrounding London, and returned home in time for their own harvest. They worked in the booming construction industry and monopolized the sedan chair business. Their wives and many children began to accompany them, and this tipped a precarious balance. Single men lodged in boarding houses or slept in barns and bunkhouses, but families needed somewhere to be together.

St Giles-in-the-Fields had been the haunt of the poor Irish since the sixteenth century. It represented cheaper, older housing with access to open ground north of Oxford Street for the pigs, and also for the bare-knuckle and dog fighting which were so staunchly pursued. The presence of such a persistent poor population meant that St Giles, in 1662, was one of the first places in London to ask for a general workhouse. In the 1690s, Thomas Neale laid out the plans for what became Seven Dials, a ‘great haunt of bird and bird-cage sellers, also of the sellers of rabbits, cats, dogs, &c
’. The medieval buildings with their deep window ledges held miniature gardens, adding cheer to a grim and declining area where ancient rural customs were clashing with the increasing restrictions of urban living.

Keeping a hog to provide meat for the family was an Irish habit, but in Tudor courts and alleys the space available for livestock was limited, making backyards noisome. To keep down costs, a family would inhabit a single room. The filthy broken-timbered buildings, like a group of scruffy nests, led the centre of St Giles’s to be christened ‘The Rookery’, and the word would be used for any poor dwelling well into the late Victorian period. The last was cleared in the great ‘improvements’ of 1904–5.